


push all my limbs forward

by noiselesspatientspider



Category: Friends at the Table (Podcast)
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Character Study, M/M, No Good Dads, Secret Samol 2017, Vignette
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-28
Updated: 2017-12-28
Packaged: 2019-02-23 04:57:12
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,484
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13182828
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/noiselesspatientspider/pseuds/noiselesspatientspider
Summary: Angelo Tristé had many names. Here are 10 of them.





	push all my limbs forward

**Author's Note:**

> happy secret samol @spatterdocks! you asked me to just kill you with calhoun feelings, so I hope this delivers. and thanks to all the organizers for pulling this whole exchange together!!

_The Prince of Pearls_

“Angelo,” his father says, his smile a distant crescent in a craggy face. 

Angelo is seven, fidgety in his robes, the weight of a golden wreath on his head. He pulls at the scratchy embroidery at his wrists and scowls.

“Do you want to sit on the throne with me?” his father asks, holding out a slender hand, and Angelo shakes his head no. The throne is high and wide, inlaid with pearls and stamped scrollwork. Every time Angelo sits on it, he gets in trouble for scuffing his feet against scenes of his father’s exploits.

“I want to go sailing,” he says, and Tristero bursts out laughing.

“Go sit with your father, dear,” his nurse tells him, his hand firm on Angelo’s back.

It’s not the first time he gets kicked out of the throne room for unseemly behavior, but it is the least dignified. Angelo’s nurse is very strong and Angelo exits tucked under his arm, his flailing fists ineffective on his nurse’s broad back. Tristero’s gentle laughter follows him down the hallway. He _hates_ throne room visits.

\--

_The Heir Apparent_

“Angelo,” his father sighs, pinching the bridge of his nose between his fingers. “I understand you’d rather not be in lessons, but believe it or not there is more to ruling a kingdom than sitting on a throne and looking pretty.”

Outside, the seagulls are wheeling around the tower again, squabbling over some dead thing.  
Angelo is 14, still adjusting to the new length of his limbs. He crosses his arms and scowls.  
“It doesn’t matter if I learn any of this anyway,” he says. “You’re not going anywhere. You’re the god of death.”

Tristero laughs quietly. “You know better than anyone that’s not true,” he says. “I’m not god of anything anymore.” He smiles, swings an arm wide, black silks swishing. “I just live here.”

\--

_The Emir of Alabaster_

They’re on the beach, warm sun on the back of Angelo’s neck. Brandish’s hair is getting long again, curling around his ears. He keeps talking about making a proper pirate braid of it, but he can never stand it enough to grow it out all the way.

Angelo is trying to explain his ideas for the future. He has a lot of ideas, but the future is long.  
“We can make it better,” Angelo says, his face bright. “We can– you won’t have to go to sea anymore.” He grabs Brandish’s hands, laces his broad blunt fingers with his own.

“Angelo, I can’t be your kept man,” Brandish says, but he’s smiling too. 

“I just thought– I was sitting there and I thought, why not here? Why not now?” 

The sun is bright and the sand gives way easily underneath the two of them, and in the distance the long wall of fog curls invitingly around the coastline. 

\--

_The Betrayer_

“Angelo,” his father croaks, his breath coming in shallow gasps. “Angelo, don’t–” 

“Shut up,” Angelo says, twisting the knife deeper. His eyes are blurring; he can’t see his father’s face. “Shut up, old man, shut up, shut up, shut _up._ ” And Tristero’s breath slides out of him like the last day of summer slipping through your fingers. 

Angelo pulls the knife free and slumps to his knees. The moonlight shimmers through the window and dances across the room, glimmering across gleaming marble floor and glittering throne, glinting blade and slick black blood. The embroidery at Tristero’s ragged throat shines as bright as ever. 

Angelo’s not sure how long he watches the moon move across the room, knees pulled to his chest. Till the shaking stops.

\--

_Our Brother_

Adelaide finds him, of course. She pulls him up and asks him what in Hieron he thinks he’s going to do. She’s not happy with his plan. Of course.

“Don’t look at me like that,” Angelo spits, wiping his dagger clean. “Abdication isn’t exactly new to this family.”

Adelaide’s jaw is set, her lips pursed. She looks every inch a queen; there’s just a slight tremor to her mouth that betrays her. They should put her on coins. They will now, he supposes.

“In half an hour, I’ll call the palace guard, and this will all get very ugly.”

“Thanks for the warning,” he says.

She catches him by the arm, her grip firmer than he remembered. “And brother? Be safe.”

He laughs then, half-hysterical. Aren’t they a picture, him tear-stained and blood-soaked, her radiant as always, pearls glinting in her hair. “You know me,” he says. “I always stay out of trouble.”

\--

_The Reluctant_

Angelo takes a boat, points its prow to the north, and sails. The wind pushes the sounds of Nacre in uproar towards him, and his ears are still ringing with alarm bells long after he knows he can’t hear them anymore. 

He doesn’t really know where he’s going. Brandish had talked about his adventures before, but geography hadn’t factored into it much, not beyond the way his hands had moved in the candlelight, a finger down Angelo’s spine to trace a coastline or follow a current. 

The boat crests a wave, sending spray into his face and shaking him loose. He turns the rudder, adjusts his course. Looks at the horizon, the long mouth where the sea swallows the sky. Goes north.

\--

_The Wretched_

“Angelo!” Adelaide shrieks, and she’s three years old, and she’s seventeen and furious with him, and she’s twenty-three and wiping their father’s blood off his face. 

“Angelo,” and it’s Brandish, a smile in his voice, a gasp, a breath, a kiss–

“Angelo,” says his father, smiling, disappointed, dead. “Angelo, come home.”

“Go away,” his son sighs, scrubbing the sleep from his eyes and resting his head on his knees. “You’re dead.”

\--

When he finally docks in Velas, they ask him at the inn for a name for the ledger. He picks a pirate captain from one of the storybooks he’d been read as a child. “Calhoun,” he says. “Just Calhoun.”

The innkeeper nods, winks at him and leads him upstairs. The bed is comfortable enough, but he spends most of the night mapping the continents in the ceiling. 

\--

_The Coward_

Angelo didn’t believe in ghosts, not as a legend, not when the dead were all around him, but Calhoun does. His crew thinks he’s superstitious for the iron he keeps at his door, the forest of glass bottles he drapes off the sides of his ship. It’s easy enough to replace them when the ropes rot through; the surest cure he knows to keep his father out of his dreams is to not have any.

He sails. He learns the coastline; Brandish would be proud. He takes people wherever they want to go. He meets Hella Varal, who has wide, broad hands and doesn’t like to dream much either. They fight together.

They meet Brandish, and he doesn’t recognize Calhoun, just charges across the boat with his sword raised. Hella gives Brandish his first death. Calhoun watches him fall to the deck inches from him, waits for him to blink back awake. He doesn’t. 

“What are you doing?” Hella shouts. “We have to go.” She tosses his sword back to him, covered in Brandish’s blood.

On the deck of the Kingdom Come, Jenny screams something wordless at his back as he vaults onto his own ship. Under her hands, Brandish might be moving. Calhoun can’t tell. He has a ship to captain.

\--

In the end, it’s Hella and her broad hands again, an ugly death in the top tower with his feet rattling against the floorboards. They’re both crying, her tears and sweat falling on his face. He didn’t think he could make Hella Varal cry. He didn’t think anyone could. But then, she’s always been much more human up close. They both have.

The throne room is dark when he wakes up. Of course. Of course it is. He throws the heavy doors wide and strides up to the dais, where his father stands waiting.

“Angelo,” Tristero says, his sleeves falling loose from his arms. “Oh, my son.” He’s spread his hands wide in an embrace. 

Calhoun doesn’t look at his face, the black eyes, the hollow cheeks. He knows he’ll only see himself. “Don’t gloat,” he says, shoulding past Tristero. “It’s a bad look.”

Tristero lets his arms fall. “You’re right,” he says. He pauses at the door as if about to speak, hand resting on its pearlescent surface, but after a beat the door just closes behind him. 

Calhoun scuffs his feet against the figures on the throne. It’s smaller than he remembered, but still just as uncomfortable. The room is cold without the sun through the windows to warm him. No wonder his father had always worn such brocaded robes.

There’s a knock at the door that rattles around marble floors and off domed ceilings. “Come in,” the Lord of Death says. "It's okay. Just come in."

**Author's Note:**

> i'm at @shipyrds on twitter, come yell at me there


End file.
